Thursday, November 24, 2011

prancing like lions

A really good movement session today, after 2 days off it was good to get in the space with Loreedana and my classmates and dance.
When the pleasure to dance rushes up inside me it is such a wonderful feeling.
To move without care or consciousness of "do I look cool or not" ,which is often my feeling dancing in a club, is actually very liberating.
We did a great free-dance exercise. We begin dancing with a partner, then one stops while the other continues dancing until the pleasure fades, At this point you give an impulse to your partner who takes over, the key here is to notice when the pleasure is fading, I danced with Laree a bit and she was quick to point out when it started to fall down. It wasgood to hear her " No, ees falling down" because then i began to notice it more in myself.
So it's either time to change or to pass it on to my partner. A really good exercise for several things in fact; pleasure, major/ minor and the fixed point.
Yes I really enjoyed it.

Neutral Mask.
Being Lions.
I was a terrible lion especially when asked to come forwrd and give a speach about gay marriage (?) wow, difficult.
I think we looked at lions to help us be graceful, beautiful but also dangerous.
The other scenes of the day included using the lion rhythm to play gangsters who had ordered pizza and the pizza delivery boy was playing with a mouse rhythm.
We turned into a bunch terrible Noo Yoik Aytalian gayngsterz bickering about anchovies and were quickly banged off, however for me I felt there was about " seconds when i started to come alive.I was really glad of thistoo, I've had such low energy for the past week or so but know I'm starting to feel like something is coming.
Part 2 of the exercise took place in a brothel, mama mia, success for Carmen and Hannah, they were both really good. I'm so pleqsed for them especially Hannah, she's been having a bit of a nightmare for the last few weeks and today she looked amazing on stage, and very mysterious, she didn't speak too much which Philippe has been telling her about for a while and as a result we started to imagine around her.
Carmen played the madam and physically you could really see the lion there, quite beautiful to watch.
In general the girls were a lot stronger than the boys today, Katie looked like a doped up hooker, a fragile, vulnerable mess, I thought oh la la what is wrong with this one, there was a strong sense of sadness to what she was doing without Katie being sad, its hard to explain unless you were there. Either way she opened my imagination even though she was only on stage for about a minute. Powerful stuff.
I'm a bit gutted because I was backstage helping people change into costume and I missed Philippe talking about acting and character I asked Sam about it and apparently he said something like the actor does not need to think about his "character" he needs to use this rhythm or that image to support the movement and the text and the character is then born in the mind of the spectator.
I wish I could have heard it exactly, its always so inspiring to hear him speak, Gonna ask him to recap it tomorrow.